Auto News 5

If you think about it, it's really quite surprising that we, as a country, love the Volkswagen Jetta as much as we have. It's been VW's most successful car here for thirty years, and yet it's been an afterthought this whole time. Take a Golf -- one of the most popular cars in the world, but never embraced by the U.S. public -- add a trunk, and voila, you have a bestseller.

The last place one would expect to find devotion to a two-decade-old, iron-block six-cylinder engine is Volkswagen. The company has developed a line of powerful turbocharged, direct-injected four-cylinders, but VW remains committed to an aging engine that defies easy categorization: the VR6.

Contrary to Nissan's "4DSC" marketing campaign, the Maxima is no four-door sports car in my eyes. It's definitely a sporty four-door, but it feels too heavy to be a true sports car. The 290-hp V-6 does make the front-wheel-drive Maxima quite peppy, but a consequence of this is that there's a fair amount of torque steer under hard acceleration. It doesn't help that a CVT (the only available transmission in this car) is the least sporty type of transmission out there. The CVT does its job pretty well, although the engine takes a while to wind out in "first gear" when you're shifting manually through the six simulated ratios of the CVT (selectable via the console shifter or the column-mounted paddles).

The Audi e-tron show car introduced in Detroit is powered by a couple of electric motors. But this blue beauty does not portend electric propulstion. If this car does go into production, it will most likely be fitted with a turbocharged five-cylinder, and it will be one of an exciting family of mid-engine cars.